Isaiah 36:19 Where are the gods of Hamath and Arphad? where are the gods of Sepharvaim? and have they delivered Samaria out of my hand? 1. Some people have made money their god, and there is not a more helpless god in all the temples of idolatry. He will never come to you in the crisis of your life. He will make little compromises with you, help you over divers stiles, solve certain little problems for you. But when your soul is in agony, when your life has wrought itself down to the one last spasm, he will be a dumb god. We brought nothing into this world, and it is certain we can carry nothing out. If you could take a five-pound note with you across the grave into yonder invisible mysterious world, nobody would know what it was. You would have to explain it, and nobody would believe you. You might hold it up, and show the watermark, and lecture upon it, and turn it round and round, and nobody could change it. 2. There is another god that some men are making. Its name is Luck! Some men say, "Things will not turn out so badly after all. I have always been able to get upon the sunny side of the road, and something will occur to get me upon that side again. I have trusted the chapter of accidents. My chances have always turned out right, and they will turn out right again." There never was so mocking an idol as luck. The young man who throws in a game of that kind and is lucky, will have another game to play. He has another competitor who will force him, and say, "Now you must have the dice out again." The name of that last competitor is Death, and he will play you. The young man says, "I do not want to play." Death grasps him by the throat, and says, "You shall play!" Now he gets hold of his dice-box, and Death always wins. 3. Some men's god is a well-favoured countenance. They trust to their shape, figure, bearing, expression. They say, "My face is an introduction, a certificate, a guarantee: wherever I go a space is cleared for me." A very superficial god! I can imagine such persons brought into circumstances which will try their god severely. Yonder is a man lofty in stature, portly in bearing, commanding in all the attributes of external person. He says that he feels a pain piercing him. He is taken home, and betakes himself to his bed. His physician comes to his room and says, "This is a case of small-pox." That god of his will be dug in the face till the man's own mother will not know him, and the sister who loved him best will pray to escape from his presence. God can blotch your skin! God can send poison into your blood! And you, who sneered at ungainly virtue, at unfavoured honesty, may be a corrupt, worm-eaten, pestilent thing in the dirt! What, then, if any man should say to you, Where is thy God? (J. Parker, D.D.) Parallel Verses KJV: Where are the gods of Hamath and Arphad? where are the gods of Sepharvaim? and have they delivered Samaria out of my hand? |
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